A scheme for energy compensation is proposed to remedy the deficiency of a DWTDCT- based scheme while applying quantization index modulation (QIM) to perform blind audio watermarking. Our experimental results show that both compensated and uncompensated DWTDCT schemes can achieve satisfactory robustness and imperceptibility at a payload capacity as high as 516.80 bps. However, because of the exploitation of the auditory masking effect, the perceptual quality attained by the compensated DWT-DCT scheme is even higher than that by the uncompensated one. With the employment of energy compensation, not only a 100% recovery of the watermark is guaranteed for non-attack situations but the survival rate is substantially improved in the case of extremely lowpass filtering. Furthermore, in a comparison with four other recently developed methods, the proposed DWT-DCT scheme observably exhibits a superior performance in imperceptivity and payload capacity while its robustness is comparable with others.